“We did it!” shouted Eggy 6 as Perry stepped back aboard the Farfinder.
“We have a time limit to get me out of here,” said Perry. “We need the shelf space cleaned out, then restocked, and a concrete plan on what to bring through to the next world.”
He’d had to go through decontamination, and the shelf space would need that done too, which was going to be a major pain in the ass. The toxic chemicals had that as a drawback, which had seemed minor then and major now. The barrier between the shelf and the real world didn’t particularly like to let air out, and so the best method was to simply drown the entire place yet again, causing the pressure differential to get high enough. Mopping out the place was becoming a recurring theme. That was already on the list of prep work.
“On it, boss,” said Eggy 6. “We’ve been working the plans while you were studying the blade.” He’d taught her that meme by accident, and immediately regretted it.
Perry made his way to the control room, where Hella and Mette Prime were sitting with Dirk.
“Mission accomplished,” said Hella by way of greeting. “World saved. We’re on the lookout for any rogue spikes, but I doubt that we’ll see any. We’re on to phase two, getting you out of here, followed by phase three, getting us out of here.”
“The shelf needs to be cleaned,” said Perry. “I mean, technically it can be done in the next world, but —”
“But we don’t know what conditions we’ll face,” said Hella with a nod.
“How is aiming going?” asked Perry, looking over at Mette Prime.
“Er,” she said. “In theory, if you step through the portal within the next cycle, we’ll still have time left to get it working. You’ll be in stasis, just like Fenilor was. We should have a month or two for more research and development. The spike dispersal rates are all over the place though, so … it’s difficult to say. We thankfully didn’t fry the megalantern when we brought Fenilor back.”
“And because of the way the punch drive works, we should be hot on your tail,” said Hella. “That’s not fully ready either, but it’s close, and in theory we could go today if we really had to.”
“Who’s on the roster?” asked Perry.
“It’ll depend on where we’re at a month from now,” said Hella.
“Most of the Mettes are staying,” said Mette Prime. “Some of the Eggys too. It’s dangerous out there, and here there’s a promise of interesting problems with the resources to investigate and solve them. Besides that, they won’t be stuck on this world forever when the Farfinder leaves. We’ll get working drives here, it’s only a matter of time. We have all the resources of the culture.”
“I’ve been meaning to bring that up,” said Dirk, rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s not clear that the GCA is going to back you, not as much as they have been.”
“What?” asked Mette Prime. Her hands tightened into fists without her seeming knowledge. “Why not?”
“Because we displaced a hell of a lot of people,” said Dirk. “Because it’s new and innovative, with outsized impact on the culture. Because the long war against the monarchists is essentially over, and we want to stabilize before we start throwing resources at expanding to other worlds. Most people don’t even know about the other worlds. Most people didn’t know that there was a danger. There are just about a dozen things that need to filter out to the public, so the symboulions can make informed decisions about what’s going to happen. The GCA only exists because there’s a will for them to exist. There’s a chance that some piece of it gets dissolved entirely. That, unfortunately, is the culture.”
“The hell,” said Perry. “You’re telling us this now?”
“It wasn’t relevant to what we were doing before,” said Dirk. “I’ve been dictating what I could, calling in favors, borrowing authority. I’m letting you know, now, that at the very least the crisis passing means that we can’t just pull in people from wherever we feel like. It’s not a buffet anymore.”
“It’s all voluntary, right?” asked Perry. “They should be coming to help of their own accord, and it’s not the culture to stop them. We can set up our own science city, if we want to, we can —”
“No,” said Dirk. “It’s not the culture to set up your own city where anything goes. The world is a united place, that’s the culture, as well as reality, that was the ideological impetus for the GCA in the first place. You can’t just drain every other place of its engineers, you can’t build new technologies, a fleet of ships that are going to take people to other worlds, anything like that. Not without input.”
“Fuck,” said Perry. He could see that it was true. They hadn’t gotten a lot of pushback from the culture, but they’d been working through Dirk, and Dirk had been massaging both sides, trying to get everything working in the near term. Now, Dirk’s sights were set much further out. “Where does that leave us?”
“Depends on how much I can do,” said Dirk. “The Global Command Authority is necessary for the global culture to function, but they’re also a release valve for high-achieving people. Having a place to send off discontented people who might otherwise form a rebellion, or a cultural fracture … it’s never been necessary before, there has always been somewhere for them to go, a way for them to fit in. But those aren’t the sorts of people we want to be sending on missions, not unless they’re the people who want to build a house but just don’t want to live in it.”
“We should be able to finish work on the Farfinder either way,” said Hella. “But you understand it puts a serious crimp in our plans for a multiversal trade network if the GCA has decided that they’re not participating. We’re operating under the assumption that Earth 2 and Markat are going to mutually benefit, if we can point them at each other, if we can make the graph into a circle.”
“I do understand that,” said Dirk. He placed a hand on his chest. “I’m on your side here.”
“Whatever,” said Perry. “We have limited time to get me ready, and after that, it’s going to be a political fight that I’m not here for. So let’s focus on the next twenty-four hours.”
“Right,” said Mette Prime. “We’re going to use masks to look through everything you have on you, make some determinations about which magics to bring through, then strip down absolutely everything that’s not necessary for the mission or your success. Either we correctly point you at Earth 2, or you end up somewhere else, but either way we don’t want to strain the skin of this universe more than we have to. It’s seen enough traffic.”
“Understood,” said Perry. “The armor, the nanites, the sword, lycanthropy, second sphere, the shelf itself … the masks are strong, so I’d take those too.” He considered for a moment. “Fenilor left behind Implements and other things. His armory is locked off, but there are things I could take.”
“How many weapons do you need?” asked Mette Prime. “I mean, realistically.”
“I’ll take an inventory of what’s available,” said Perry. “But you’re right, there’s reason to be cautious. Just … maybe not as cautious as you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking we should be extremely cautious,” said Hella. She folded her arms across her chest. “We’ll spend time running numbers, but they’re guesses. It would be darkly funny if you killed everyone in the world by pushing through with a treasure trove, but I’m aiming for operational efficiency, not humor.”
“Understood,” said Perry.
The meeting went long after that, but there wasn't much that was needed from Perry. He would help clean out the shelf, almost certainly by dunking it in the ocean and then doing his best to dry it out, but from prior experience, that was a whole process. They would carefully select which magics they would bring with them, which would include everything that Perry needed, along with everything that the Farfinder needed for continued operations when they arrived.
When they were done, and everyone was filtering out, Mette Prime stopped him.
“I’m not coming with you,” she said.
“Okay?” asked Perry. “I hadn’t assumed that you would. You can come via the Farfinder later. In theory that will sever the thresholder link, and if we find out that it doesn’t, that’s also useful information.”
“You don’t care at all about being in a new world all on your own?” asked Mette Prime.
“We just got done hypothesizing that the Farfinder would be right on my heels,” said Perry.
“No,” said Mette Prime. “It’s a range. We have samples to look at, all the people that went through, and some of them went through fast. If you go through fast … I mean, we might be a long time following after. A month. More.”
“Ah,” said Perry. “Well, if that happens … it happens.”
Mette Prime frowned at him. “We were supposed to be partners,” she said.
“We are partners,” said Perry. “You’re more a partner than anyone, aside from maybe Kes. And you’re the one saying that you aren’t going to come with me.”
“I’m not coming with you because we still don’t know about the interaction,” said Mette Prime. She was making direct eye contact, and it was almost like she was trying to intimidate him, except there was a notable height difference. “I don’t want to be a thresholder. I’ve seen enough of it. It doesn’t play to my skillsets. But you should have asked me about that, should have wondered, not just accepted it.”
“Sorry,” said Perry. “I’m trying to accept that I’m saying goodbye to this world. I had kind of thought that it wouldn’t happen, and now here we are. I value you, of course I do, but it’s been just me for a long time now, and I’m used to the goodbyes. I mean, there’s always Marchand, but you know what I mean.” It was a lie. That whole time aboard the Natrix, that hadn’t been ‘just him’. He waited for her to call him on it, but she didn’t.
“You want to be alone,” said Mette Prime.
“No,” said Perry. “Or … I don’t know. Have I told you the shitty thing about being on Earth?”
“You’ve told me many shitty things,” said Mette Prime. “I don’t know which you’re thinking about.”
“The thing about Earth was … there were eight billion people. My country had, I don’t know, 330 million of them. And there was just nothing that I could do that would make a difference in the scheme of things.” He sighed. “And now it’s like I’m back there, there’s this sense of alienation, I guess, like you’re all building these ships that are going to travel the multiverse, and establish a trade network with other worlds, and there will be diplomacy, and none of it is going to involve me in any really substantial way. In fact, the Farfinder would be better off following virtually anyone else, someone without any wins, except that the ring allows them to backdoor some physics. And I could simply give the ring to someone else, for that matter.”
“Are you offering to do that?” asked Mette Prime.
“Am I … no,” said Perry. “Or … no. I still want to reach Earth 2, I want to resurrect Richter, I can bring enough magic with me to do that, I think, and with the Farfinder I can stop being a thresholder, probably.”
“Still needs testing,” said Mette Prime.
“Right,” said Perry.
“And you’d do that?” she asked. “You’d resurrect this mythical woman and then just … stop? In a world that’s basically a slightly better version of the one you left?”
Perry stared at her. “Sure,” he said.
“Bullshit,” said Mette Prime. She folded her arms.
“I have a lot of work to do,” said Perry. He moved past her, and she made no move to stop him.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
~~~~
Fenilor had left weapons behind. Most of them weren’t to Perry’s satisfaction. The flail thing was incredibly difficult to use, and in his first attempt, Perry hit himself in the chest and did a fair amount of damage to the power armor. It was difficult to get it to go where he wanted it to go, and even the few times he managed it, it wasn’t quick to retrieve. The range wasn’t even that good, compared to his sword, and was definitely far worse than his gun.
The time knife, the one that had stopped him in his tracks when he’d lost against Fenilor, was better, but in practice it was mostly good against someone who was already immobilized, and could only slow down someone who was moving quickly. That meant that its strike was mostly useful for cutting someone like a normal knife, but Perry had to admit that there was at least some utility to it.
The giant sword that Fenilor had been using on the moon had also been left behind. It was enormous but surprisingly simple to use, and after ten minutes Perry saw how he might adapt to it. It wasn’t special though, and he couldn’t lug it around — it would have to stay in the shelf — and while it could cut through steel with enough power put behind it, it would also be nearly useless in any other circumstance but a flat field.
He wished that he’d been able to keep the spear from breaking. That had been a good weapon.
The armors were similarly a bust, ruined in a way that wasn’t materially beyond repair, but had sapped them of whatever magic they’d once had. The armor that had turned Fenilor into a blob still registered as magical under the right mask, faintly off-gassing something, but it didn’t seem likely that it would ever function again, given that it belonged to its own unique class.
It felt like the only get from this world, aside from the Farfinder and everything they could bring, would be the masks. Those were good, undeniably, but they didn’t feel like enough. They didn’t feel like they fundamentally transformed Perry’s methods of operation, not like the shelf did, not like second sphere.
Perhaps that was the eventual fate of all thresholders, doomed to eventually hit a world that didn’t offer quite enough. Fenilor had probably felt that way sometimes, when a new thresholder dropped in and just had a fancy sword that got added to the armory, never to be used again.
There were other options though, some of them attractive. Markat had many magics, after all, and while the focus of the science cities had been on broadly useable ones that would improve society rather than those that could provide individuals with power, they had more than a few tricks.
“From my understanding, everything we pack in with you raises the risk that the entire universe collapses,” said Dirk. “Is that right?”
“From what the nerds tell me, basically, yes,” said Perry.
“Frankly, I’m not sure we should even let you go,” said Dirk.
“Obviously there are some quibbles to make about what it means in practical terms,” said Perry. “There’s a probability curve, there’s all kinds of things we don’t know, Fenilor was going to leave with an enormous cache of materials from every opponent he had ever fought, and we know for a fact that a universe can survive substantially more damage than this one has taken.”
“We actually don’t know that,” said Eggy 6, who was standing by them.
“There have been high-energy fights,” said Perry. “One of the first worlds I went to had a whole history of thresholders. It’s not uncommon. We’re dealing with a great many punches.”
“Most of our math is based on what appear to be observed instabilities,” said Eggy 6. “We haven’t observed those instabilities elsewhere, not to this magnitude. This world might literally be the most damaged world of any of them.”
“You should only be taking what you absolutely need,” said Dirk.
It rankled Perry, maybe because he agreed with it.
So in the end, he didn’t go with a lantern and he wasn’t given a robot. Both would have had logistical issues, but a lantern in particular with a stash of fuels for it and an arrangement of lenses might have allowed for production of food, air, water, and everything else Perry might need in a dead and barren world.
But of course, having those things would make a dead and barren world more likely, so it couldn’t even be said to be a great trade-off. Perry didn’t want to get blue-shelled.
Once the shelf space was cleaned out, Perry filled it back up again, this time with a stockpile of ammunition, a cache of food and water, a collection of clothes that might help him blend in with whatever locals he found, a variety of mundane tools, a stack of cellphones and hand chargers, and all the individual components whose magic would, in theory, allow the minimum viable Farfinder to succeed. He’d be bringing through all of his own powers as well, which meant only two gadgets were deemed ‘necessary’: one that would allow their preferred engines to function and another that allowed their extradimensional space.
“We unfortunately don’t know whether the Grand Spell penalizes you for having our help,” said Hella. “My guess is that it does, but it could well be a coincidence that Fenilor got aboard, my crew were murdered, and half the ship was destroyed.” He lips were thin. She didn’t talk about the crew often. “Obviously we don’t want to put ourselves in the line of fire in the next world any more than we did in this one, but the only way to test it is to see whether you pull through on your own.”
“Mmm,” said Perry. “We’ll be in touch once I’m through, if we arrive essentially concurrently. I’ll hold off on having your help for as long as possible.”
“If the world is small enough, we might not be able to hide,” said Hella. “The smallest of worlds doesn’t have room for much. They can be the size of a town. They can be claustrophobic.”
“There’s no way for me to send a signal?” asked Perry. “No way to tell you what it’s like, help you prep?”
“Not yet,” said Eggy 6. “Soon!”
“Probably not,” said one of the Mettes. “It’s a miracle that one way travel through the punch works, and we can’t even send a signal, it has to be an entire structure with a punch drive, which we can’t even shrink down that much. Ship building is going to be rough.”
The conversations seemed to be endless, and part of it was that Perry was at the center of a concerted effort not to fuck things up too badly. They were trying to give Perry “soft” advantages, those that could be used to win over the locals, whoever they might be.
Perry had already started up a flowchart during the interminable wait for the wiggler to be finished. The flowchart was useless, but he had an entire catalog of worlds to look through, every reading the Farfinder had ever taken, along with all the more speculative worlds mentioned at any point by another thresholder. It was impossible to make a concrete plan, but it was very possible to plan for lots of contingencies.
It was while he was working on the flowchart that he’d actually felt some spark of usefulness, and now that the hour was near, it was coming back in full force.
Maybe someone else could have made a better plan, but they wouldn’t be there, they wouldn’t be making the decisions, they wouldn’t be carrying it all out. It would just be Perry, at least for the first bit of it, and probably for most of what came after. He wouldn’t be going to a fucked up world like this one, he would be going to a different place, one where a single man could make a difference, where there would be a fair fight.
Most likely the flowchart was going out the window as soon as he arrived. Maybe he’d have a fight like Fenilor just had, one where the enemy was well and truly prepared. Signal tracking was possible, it had happened across a number of worlds now. The only reason to think that he wouldn’t get shot coming out of a portal was that the Grand Spell seemed to bias in favor of a fair fight, though this world had shaken his confidence.
And it was also possible that in the time he was in stasis, the days or months before the other end of the portal set him somewhere, they would figure the whole thing out, crack the code, and send him straight to Earth 2. Once there, there would likely be another thresholder to worry about, but it was possible that they would solve that too.
It was possible that the whole Grand Spell would unravel while he was in stasis.
Perry went over everything he was going to carry with him. It was important, just in case the shelf space failed for whatever reason. An Eggy had talked about interference, and the ways in which basic things sometimes failed. It could happen with magic too, though that was more rare. If the shelf failed, he didn’t want to be left with nothing.
“Limited loadout,” said Kes, who wandered in while Perry was preparing. “Not sure how to feel about that.”
“I agree, in principle, that it’s necessary,” said Perry. “I’d like them to get some hard numbers, but it’s going to be easier to have hard numbers once I’m gone.” He turned to look at his clone. “This is your chance to leave too.”
“Yeah,” said Kes. “To become a thresholder.” He clucked his tongue. “I considered it.”
“And?” asked Perry. “Not for you?”
“I’m staying here,” said Kes. “Dirk has a place for me. From what I can tell, he aims to use me as a bloodhound.”
“You’re not even going aboard the Farfinder?” asked Perry.
“I might change my mind,” said Kes. “We do that, sometimes. We can be swayed by the right words in our ear. But the plan is to stay on a planet that at least has its shit together. I’ve always been a fan of libraries. And there’s free school here, I can go back to being a grad student if I really want to.” He gave a small smile.
“I don’t think we’re that diverged,” said Perry. “I don’t buy that this is what you want, frankly.”
“I think having a tenth the advantages you do really puts me off traveling the many worlds,” said Kes. “I don’t have full control of the wolf yet. There’s a good chance that I would kill someone. There’s a good chance that it would become the impetus for an entire protracted war with another thresholder.”
“True,” said Perry. There was no use denying it, and besides, it wasn’t even really his place to give advice. “I think you won’t find happiness here.”
“Maybe not,” said Kes. “Do you think you’ll find happiness out there?”
“We’re going to revive Richter,” said Perry. “Eventually, anyway. We’re closer than we’ve ever been.”
“I hope that works out,” said Kes. He shifted his weight. “Do you regret making me?”
“No,” said Perry. “Of course not, why would I? Come on, you’re not going to make this some family thing, I’m not your father, I’m not your god.”
“I’m not bent out of shape about it,” said Kes. “But how often do you get a conversation with your maker like this? To know why you were created?”
“You have all the memories,” said Perry. “You know the whole thought process, it’s there for you too.”
“Yeah, but not everything that came after,” said Kes. “Not the regret, if it’s there.”
“I had wanted you to be something else,” said Perry. “I don’t know what, exactly.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Sorry.”
“You wanted a friend,” said Kes.
“I wanted a warrior,” said Perry. “Someone to stand side by side. And you just came out without enough power.” There, he said it. It wasn’t just the power, not just the utility, it was something else, being equals, maybe that was what he was after.
Kes nodded, but he grimaced too. “And I could go out there and build back up to the level you’re at. I could go through the portal and fight my way through new adventures, get cool new toys, have sex with interesting women … and then maybe die in the process. Maybe die right away. It’s not the dying that’s stopping me though.” He paused. “It’s seeing you that stopped me.”
“Seeing me what?” asked Perry.
“I don’t know,” said Kes. “It makes me want to do it less. It makes me think ‘alright, there’s a Perry out there that’s doing that, it’s sorted, it doesn’t need me’. Like the important thing isn’t the doing, it’s knowing that I could, that there’s a world where I can beat the shit out of all comers, where I can be a focal point for the gaze of nation-states. I think if, back on Earth, I had known that was something I could be and do, I might never have gone through the portal in the first place.”
“That’s cope,” said Perry.
“Maybe,” said Kes. “I guess we’ll see. If the Loop gets set up, maybe we can talk about it in a year or two. Maybe I’ll regret not taking the portal when it was offered. Right now, I’m going to stick with Mette Prime.”
“Just Prime?” asked Perry.
“Maybe we’ll do some poly thing, I don’t know,” said Kes. “Come on, we’re not so different that you can’t see the appeal of that. This is paradise.”
“Cope,” Perry said again, though he believed it a little less this time. “You’re just going to indulge in hedonism? That’s your answer?”
“For now,” said Kes. “I’ll see what Dirk has in mind for me. Maybe I’ll try my hand at sports. There’s a whole sports culture here that we haven’t really gotten into, and the werewolf thing gives an advantage there, so if I wanted to prove myself, maybe that would be enough for me.”
“Do they let you do it if you’re a werewolf?” asked Perry.
“That’s the culture,” said Kes. “They would never stop people from being their best just to level a playing field. They just also come to an understanding that being a fast runner is something that only a specific subset of a specific species is going to be good at.”
“I guess that’s better than being fake,” said Perry.
“They’re more about the arts,” said Kes. “But we’ve seen how those turn out.”
Perry nodded. “I’m going to miss having someone from Earth to talk with.”
“Maybe in the next world,” said Kes. “Hey, maybe you could meet up with Maya again.”
Perry smiled at that, but the smile faded. It was the nature of thresholding that you didn’t really meet up with people again. The past was the past, except the whole idea of the Loop, punches you could follow to get back to a starting world, was that he would revisit the past.
“I’ve gotta get going,” said Perry.
“Of course,” nodded Kes. “Just wanted to say goodbye, for whatever that’s worth to you.”
“Goodbye,” said Perry. “I’ll think of you when I’m sleeping in the armor, scared for my life, and wishing that I was comfortable.”
“And I’ll do the opposite,” said Kes. “And if we ever meet up again, we can swap stories.”
Kes left, and Perry packed up. He would miss some things about this world, and Kes would probably be one of them, even if their friendship would always be a little bit strange and strained.
Perry was taken by the Farfinder to the portal with three hours left on the clock. The shelf space was cleaned out and restocked, his personal stores of energy were filled, his shoulder gun had been cleaned and reloaded with extra ammo in the shelf, Marchand had done full diagnostics and all the software prep work, and it was just about as much as a person could prepare to go through a magical portal, at least given that he was going alone and with no foreknowledge.
“Sorry, March, I should have let you have your goodbyes too,” said Perry as they exited the ship and went down to the moon’s surface.
“Sir, whatever makes you think that I didn’t take care of that on my own?” asked Marchand. “I’ve been in contact with everyone I care to be, and have said everything I needed to say.”
“Oh,” said Perry. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”
“I have done my best to leave the others with a positive impression of you, sir,” said Marchand.
“Thanks, March,” said Perry.
“I can’t say that you made it easy, sir,” said March.
The portal was still sitting on the surface of the moon. The pieces of Fenilor hadn’t moved much, they’d just baked and off-gassed and frozen before baking again.
Perry drew his sword. He got into a combat stance.
“Go combat ready,” said Perry.
“Yes, sir,” said Marchand.
“So long, Markat,” he said as he stepped through.